Book review: Clever Commuter by Gareth Moore

Pam Norfolk

Is your daily commute to work a brain-numbing experience? Are you constantly willing away the minutes and hours?

Well now you can limber up your thinking muscles, give your brain a much-needed workout and use the time more productively with a dynamic programme of brain-training exercises.

Dr Gareth Moore, author of a wide range of brain-training and puzzle books for both children and adults, has put together this superb collection of puzzles and problems to help you to think in a smarter, faster way… and have fun at the same time.

With Clever Commuter as your trusty travelling companion, you can claim back all that lost journey time and use it to improve your mental agility through a series of short problems specifically designed to promote cognitive capacity, alertness and stave off brain ageing.

Dr Moore tells us that we are more than just the sum of our experiences… our brains learn patterns and expand on the information they are given. The brain loves new experiences and it loves to learn, and experience in one area can also help in other seemingly unrelated areas.

So to upgrade your brain, you need to present it with as wide a range of challenges and new experiences as possible. Each of the problems found in this book tests a key element of your intelligence, from visual memory and comprehension, to pattern recognition and number crunching.

Puzzlers are also advised to resist giving up when they get stuck. The key is to keep on guessing because there’s a good chance you will make progress and learn something, even if it’s not always part of the solution.

And when you have finished the challenges and puzzles in Clever Commuter, there are still lots of things you can do to carry on training your brain including visiting new places, learning a new language or having a go at any unfamiliar activity.

So whether you want to get your brain in good shape for the day ahead or to simply sit back with some enjoyable puzzles, this is the ideal mental workout to test your wits and impress the boss.

You can’t change your commute time but you can change the way your brain works …